Best Internal Hard Drive in 2020

There are countless inexpensive ways to add extra storage to your PC, but if you want the fastest and most reliable performance around, you’ll probably want to have a decent internal option. Whether you’re looking to archive old projects for work, store your Steam gaming library, or create a media server, an internal hard drive is going to be a pretty important consideration.

While the distinctions from hard drive to hard drive aren’t going to be that great, there is a distinct difference between a run of the mill internal hard drive and the best internal hard drives on the market. We’ve picked 10 of our favorite internal hard drive models – and in addition to providing reviews for each, we’ll also offer some smart shopping advice.

Internal Hard Drives Buyer’s Guide

External hard drives are cheaper, smaller, and more accessible than ever before, but internal hard drives still offer a level of reliability that makes them worth the extra effort. Whether you’re looking to replace your hard drive for laptop or desktop, there’s a focus right now on building computers that make upgrades accessible to even the tech illiterate. And since they’re connected directly to your computer’s hardware, you can set up more regularly scheduled backup of your data with internal hard drives.

Hard Disk Format

There are three formats to look for when shopping for hard drives. An HDD is a more traditional design with a format that hasn’t changed much in decades. They dominate our list of the best hard drives because they tend to be very cheap while offering incredibly large storage capacities. That said, they’re the slowest hard drives around, and they’re more prone to damage, so they’re among the best hard drives for a stationary desktop.

SSDs (Solid State Drives) are more or less absent from this list, but they’re quickly becoming one of the most common types of hard drives around. These drives are expensive and offer less storage capacity, They’re a great choice for gamers, but since capacity is a bigger deal for internal hard drives, we haven’t focused our attention on them here.

Hybrid drives combine the best aspects of both an HDD and SSD. By making use of both in a single system, hybrid drives give you fast loading speeds for content along with an above average storage capacity. The one downside is that these aren’t the best hard drives in any one category. Instead, they offer a balance between speed and capacity.

Speeds

Read and write speeds tell you how quickly hard drives can process data, and that has an impact on how fast your computer’s CPU can process content. For this list, we’ve made use of a simplified measurement known as rotations per minute. That raw speed can give you a pretty solid indicator of how well drives will get and process information. The best hard drives generally offer an RPM of 7200 which translates into maximum write speeds of about 160 Mbps.

How much write speeds matter is going to depend on what you tend to use your computer for. While the faster speeds you can find with an SSD or a higher speed HDD can be the best choice for games and other software that requires a lot of processing power, drives with very fast speeds won’t be a necessity for average casual or office use.

Form Factor

Form factor is a pretty easy thing to quantify. The bigger the form factor, the more space it takes up. For that reason, 2.5 inch hard drives are most commonly used in laptops, while 3.5 inch hard drives can be significantly more high capacity, but they’re often the best hard drives to get for a desktop computer.

Wrapping Up

Finding the best internal hard drives for computers can have a major impact on your performance, and it doesn’t have to cost you much money. But you’ll need to do your research. We’ll keep updating our list as new products are released, so keep checking back whenever you need the best of the best hard drives.